So now we're going to do embossing and it requires a heat gun which is you know, women love tools. Don't kid yourselves, it's not just those guys. And then this is a clear embossing powder. Which I am going to liberally sprinkle on my stamped image. And then I just gather it together like that and pour it into my container and it puts like a little film of this powder on it. I recommend always shutting your embossing powder, so quickly you can knock it over. Anyways, so there that is, I'm going to turn on my heat gun which is very loud, and what I'm going to do is be melting the powder. This is very hot, this is not for kids, or weird adults who think it's a hairdryer or you will have fried hair and a blistered scalp. So you turn this sucker on, and there we have an embossed Thanks. Embossing is so much fun, here you can see here is color, here is black and white. You could go in with water colors or colored pencils and do other techniques. I forgot to clean my stamp off so I'm going to do that now you don't think I'm completely worthless. These are baby wipes, and this is sort of an easy way of cleaning a stamp. A sponge in a plate of water works also. And basically all you're doing is you're stamping off all the color. You'll never get your rubber back to that beautiful little red thing again, but there you see it, I'm taking it off. I'll wipe it like this, speaking of this wiping, on a brand new stamp, if you want to abrade your surface just a little bit just even on brown paper, by just going like this, that will just rough up that rubber just a teeny bit so it takes the ink better. My stamps always look pathetically dirty, I think it's a mark of creativity.

So we can talk about actually making your impression with multiple images. Some stamps, like this wonderful little leaf, it doesn't really make any difference if you mask with it because you just do multiple images right on top of each other like this. There's one, and you can just do another one right on top and the image is beautiful without masking. And you can change the color, so I can just add another color, notice I didn't wash it in between because then I'll have a little tinge of the green in at the same time. So, you can just do that, which is just multiple overlapping stamps, or, you can actually mask. So I'm going to do a little composition to show you what that means. I'm going to do this little label stamp. I'm just going to do this on white paper, you're obviously going to be doing it on your project, or your card or whatever it is you're making. So I'm inking it up with orange, just a Cat's Eye because it's handy. And this is small enough that I can almost get enough pressure without standing up so I'm just going to make a simple impression just like that. And now I'm going to use post it stamps and I'm going to, I don't even have to re-ink it, I'm just going to do that image again, and now I'm going to get a scissors and I'm going to cut that out, and this is my mask. I should have done it closer to the post it note border because that really is wonderful to help it stick down. And I'm cutting in a bit on the image, if you cut on the outside of the image you're going to get a little color halo around it so I'm trying to keep the halo pretty much to a minimum. That's pretty good. Then I'm going to use how about this cute little leaf image and I'll use this green again that I used on the other leaves, get this sucker back in place and I'm going to just, this is a very simple mask because the wonderful little image is very tiny. And it's very easy to do. Sometimes it'll take you a half an hour just to cut your mask out for God's sake save it, just put it in a little glassine envelope or anyplace like that. And now I want to introduce a little color so I'm going to use my Cat's Eye to just tip the edges of this it'll make it a little more interesting. And notice I am not using a mask over my leaves because they are quite charming on their own. Then again I'm going to put a little color on that, now I'm going to put one over here, and you just go on and on building and building until you finish. So I'm going to call that done, and there is it is, isn't that cute? It really looks as if I did the back ones first when in fact, the front layer is always the first one that you ink. I'll show you another fun thing. Let's pretend this is some kind of holly sort of plant, one of my favoritest tools is an eraser on a pencil so I'm just going to put some berries in there, and then because I want to continue this illusion of behind, I'm going to do a few of them just halfway. Cute, huh? And then you could just write your name on that if it's going to be a placecard or you could cut the whole thing out as a label for herbs or spices. Masking is a great thing.

Then last, but certainly not least is stamping on things. Walls, foreheads, lampshades. So this is a cute little lampshade that somebody up in design actually made. And I asked her if I could borrow it, she used it for one of our photo shoots, and she didn't finish it, so I said 'Oh I can try to finish it', I could also ruin it, but that's okay. Now this one happens to be covered with linen. Linen is a harder surface to stamp on than paper, but it's pretty forgiving also. You can see in the back there are some empty spaces so I'm going to stamp right here and this is a little trickier because you want to roll the stamp ever so slightly. Because it's a curved surface, so I'm just going to tilt it a teeny tiny bit and I've got my hand behind it to give it some energy and you see it still it too light. So the trick then is to put light ones all over the place so that's my technique for covering up mistakes. Oh, there's another one, use our stickers, cover it completely up, but that's a different point, you can't do that on lampshades. But, so now I've got, you can see this one is way too light, so I'm going to be down here and I'm going to push down much harder, I wonder if my stamp pad is dry. That's another problem, you always have to make sure that your stamp pad is juicy, now see much better. Now you just go all the way around making your images, and you can cover just about anything. Pretty cool!